So I guess for Firefox users it’s time to enable the resist fingerprinting option ? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/resist-fingerprinting
You can also use canvas blocker add-on.
Use their containers (firefox multi-account container add-on) feature and make a google container so that all google domains go to that container.
If you want to get crazy, in either set in about:config or make yourself a user.is file in your Firefox profile directory and eliminate all communication with google. And some other privacy tweaks below.
google shit and some extra privacy/security settings
Google domains and services:
user_pref(“browser.safebrowsing.allowOverride”, false);
user_pref(“browser.safebrowsing.blockedURIs.enabled”, false);
user_pref(“browser.safebrowsing.downloads.enabled”, false);
user_pref(“browser.safebrowsing.downloads.remote.block_dangerous”, false);
user_pref(“browser.safebrowsing.downloads.remote.block_dangerous_host”, false);
user_pref(“browser.safebrowsing.downloads.remote.block_potentially_unwanted”, false):
user_pref(“browser.safebrowsing.downloads.remote.block_uncommon”, false);
user_pref(“browser.safebrowsing.downloads.remote.enabled”, false);
user_pref(“browser.safebrowsing.downloads.remote.url”, “”);
user_pref(“browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled”, false);
user_pref(“browser.safebrowsing.phishing.enabled”, false);
user_pref(“browser.safebrowsing.provider.google.advisoryName”, “”);
user_pref(“browser.safebrowsing.provider.google.advisoryURL”, “”);
user_pref(“browser.safebrowsing.provider.google.gethashURL”, “”);
user_pref(“browser.safebrowsing.provider.google.lists”, “”);
user_pref(“browser.safebrowsing.provider.google.reportURL”, “”);
user_pref(“browser.safebrowsing.provider.google.updateURL”, “”);
user_pref(“browser.safebrowsing.provider.google4.advisoryName”, “”);
user_pref(“browser.safebrowsing.provider.google4.advisoryURL”, “”);
user_pref(“browser.safebrowsing.provider.google4.dataSharingURL”, “”);
user_pref(“browser.safebrowsing.provider.google4.gethashURL”, “”);
user_pref(“browser.safebrowsing.provider.google4.lists”, “”);
user_pref(“browser.safebrowsing.provider.google4.pver”, “”);
user_pref(“browser.safebrowsing.provider.google4.reportURL”, “”);
user_pref(“browser.safebrowsing.provider.google4.updateURL”, “”);Privacy and security stuff:
user_pref(“dom.push.enabled”, false);
user_pref(“dom.push.connection.enabled”, false);user_pref(“layout.css.visited_links_enabled”, false);
user_pref(“media.navigator.enabled”, false);user_pref(“network.proxy.allow_bypass”, false);
user_pref(“network.proxy.failover_direct”, false);
user_pref(“network.http.referer.spoofSource”, true);user_pref(“security.ssl.disable_session_identifiers”, true);
user_pref(“security.ssl.enable_false_start”, false);
user_pref(“security.ssl.treat_unsafe_negotiation_as_broken”, true);
user_pref(“security.tls.enable_0rtt_data”, false);user_pref(“privacy.partition.network_state.connection_with_proxy”, true);
user_pref(“privacy.resistFingerprinting”, true);
user_pref(“privacy.resistFingerprinting.block_mozAddonManager”, true);
user_pref(“privacy.resistFingerprinting.letterboxing”, true);
user_pref(“privacy.resistFingerprinting.randomization.daily_reset.enabled”, true);
user_pref(“privacy.resistFingerprinting.randomization.enabled”, true);user_pref(“screenshots.browser.component.enabled”, false);
user_pref(“privacy.spoof_english”, 2);
user_pref(“webgl.enable-debug-renderer-info”, false); user_pref(“webgl.enable-renderer-query”, false);
This is why I like Lemmy, never knew canvas blocker was a thing. Thank you.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around fingerprinting, so excuse my ignorance. Doesn’t an installed plugin such as Canvas Blocker make you more uniquely identifiable? My reasoning is that very few people have this plugin relatively speaking.
Maybe if they can connect you to your other usage but it’s probably more of their resources and such a small % of the population that it isn’t worth the time to subvert? Idk just guessing here
I use (and love) Firefox containers, and I keep all Google domains in one container. However, I never know what to do about other websites that use Google sign in.
If I’m signing into XYZ website and it uses my Google account to sign in, should I put that website in the Google container? That’s what I’ve been doing, but I don’t know the right answer.
Yes, that’s right. Also seriously consider ditching Single
StalkSign On entirely.Thank you. I agree re ditching it and have been working on that.
I’ve used this. The only annoyance is that all the on-screen timestamps remain in UTC because JS has no idea what timesone you’re in.
I get that TZ provides a piece of the fingerprint puzzle, but damn it feels excessive.
Wait is that why my Firefox giving me errors when I try to log into websites with 2FA?
Privacy Badger anyone?
But does privacy badger also act on the canvas APIs & cie. ?
Does ublock do this?
No
Please don’t enable this blindly. A lot of modern websites depend on a bunch of features which will simply not work with that flag enabled. Only do it, if you’re willing to compromise and debug things a bit
So, manifest v3 was all about preventing Google’s competitors from tracking you so that Google could forge ahead.
This has been the case for years. I develop fingerprinting services so AMA but it’s basically a long lost battle and browser are beyond the point of saving without a major resolution taking place.
The only way to resist effective fingerprint is to disable Javascript in its entirity and use a shared connection pool like wireguard VPN or TOR. Period. Nothing else works.
How can you live with yourself?
I do it as a security measure for private institutions and everyone involved has signed contracts. It’s not on the public web.
I know right. I was offered a job at a betting site and online casino with those addictive games and shit. Gave that a hard pass, said no thanks, don’t think that’s the right business area for me. I would feel so dirty going to and coming from work every damn day.
Hello grease monkey and no script, my old friends
What are some good scripts for grease monkey?
Wouldn’t selective disabling of JavaScript make fingerprinting easier? Your block and white list are likely to be unique.
Tracking scripts are usually separate from the scripts that do stuff. But also giving them less info is always just better.
Disabling JavaScript entirely is another data point for fingerprinting. Only a tiny fraction of users do it.
Besides, without JavaScript most websites are not functional anymore. Those that are are likely not tracking you much in the first place.
Yeah unfortunately disabling JS is not viable option tho onion websites are perfectly functional without JS and it just shows how unnecessarily JS had been expanded without regard for safety but theres no stopping the web.
I disable JS with noscript.net and it really is an enormous pain. It has some security advantages, like I don’t get ambushed so easily by an unfamiliar site and pop ups. I often will just skip a site if it seems too needy
This is what I’ve been saying for months in the reddit privacy sub and to people IRL. Some people seem perfectly happy to just block ads so they don’t see the tracking. Literal ignorance is bliss. Most simply don’t have time or wherewithal to do the minimal work it takes to enjoy relative “privacy” online.
FWIW, any VPN where you can switch locations should do the job since the exit node IPs ought to get re-used. My practice is to give BigG a vanilla treat because my spouse hasn’t DeGoogled, and leave anything attached to our real names with location A. Then a whole second non-IRL-name set of accounts usually with location B with NoScript and Chameleon. Then anything else locations C, D, E, etc.
Ugh… This all sucks.
What are you people trying to hide ??? /s
So… how effective is it? The fingerprinting. I’m guessing there are studies? Also don’t know whether there’s been legal precedent, ie whether fingerprinting has been recognized as valid means of user identification in a court case.
It’s super effective but there are very few real use cases for it outside of security and ad tracking. For example you can’t replace cookies with it because while good fingerprint is unique it can still be fragile (browser update etc.) which would cause data loss and require reauth.
Usually fingerprint plays a supporting role for example when you do those “click here” captchas that’s actually just giving the browser time to fingerprint you and evaluate your trust to decide whether to give you a full captcha or let you through. So fingerprint is always there in tbe background these days tho mostly for security and ad tracking.
As for court cases and things like GDPR - the officials are still sleeping on this and obviously nobody wants to talk about it because it’s super complex and really effective and effects soo many systems that are not ad tech.
Usually fingerprint plays a supporting role for example when you do those “click here” captchas that’s actually just giving the browser time to fingerprint you and evaluate your trust to decide whether to give you a full captcha or let you through. So fingerprint is always there in tbe background these days tho mostly for security and ad tracking.
I’ve been wondering about those “click here” captchas and their purpose 🤔
Yes, and even before js fingerprint happens the connection is fingerprinted through HTTP and TLS protocol fingerprints as each system is slightly different like supporting different encryption ciphers, different http engine and how requests are performed etc.
So even before you see the page itself the server has a pretty good understanding of your client which determines whether you see this captcha box at all. That’s why on public wifi and rare operating systems (like linux) and web browsers you almost always get these captcha verifications.
The more complex the web becomes the easier it is to gather this data and currently the web is very complex with no sight of stopping.
Huh had no idea. I still wonder how accurate this is though, like whether it can be used forensically as the word “fingerprint” suggests to identify a specific person/private machine. It’s kind of fascinating as a topic. I would think that given that most people use similar setups, similar hardware and software, similar routers and settings, it would be impossible, but perhaps with enough details of a particular setup, a specific machine and user can be identified with decent accuracy.
Would it be possible for a browser or extension to just provide false metadata in order to subvert this type of fingerprinting?
So from what I understand, theres 2 common ways that browsers combat this. Someone add to or correct me if I’m wrong.
- Browsers such as Mull combat this by looking the same as every other browser. If you all look the same, it’s hard to tell you apart. I believe this is why people recommend using default window size when using Tor.
Ex: Everyone wearing black pants and hoodies with the facemasks. Extremely hard to tell who is who.
- Browsers such as Brave randomize metadata that fingerprinting collects so that it’s more difficult to piece it all together and build a trend/profile on someone.
Ex: look like a dog in one place, a cat in another place. They get data for a dog but that doesn’t help build anything if the rest of the data is a cat, hamster, whatever. No way to piece it together to be useful.
In both my examples, there are caveats. Just because everyone dressed the same doesn’t mean someone isn’t taller or shorter, or skinnier or fatter. There can still be tells to help narrow down. Or a cat that barks like a dog suddenly is more linkable to a dog if that makes sense lol.
In other words it still depends user behavior that can contribute to the effectiveness of these tools.
EDIT: got distracted. To answer your question I don’t think so. I think it’s more about user behavior blending in or being randomized. I think the only thing an extension would be able to do is possibly randomize the data but I’m unsure of such an extension yet. These aren’t the only options, these are just ones I’ve read about recently. Online behavior, browswr window size, and I’m sure so much more also goes into it. But every little bit helps and is better than nothing.
EDIT2: Added examples for each for clarity.
Mull is discontinued unfortunately, although I think it got forked?
Yeah maybe Tor Browser was the better example. Just trying to get the point out lol.
Yep. It’s fork is called ironfox
For mobile, yes, development stopped.
However, Mullvad (from the actual VPN folk) for desktop still exists.
The first point is flawed and even TOR doesn’t execute javascript because it’s impossible to catch everything when you give the server full code running capabilities.
The second point is more plausible but there’s an incredible amount of work to do to fix this. Like, needing to rework browser engines from ground up and removing all of the legacy cruft. Brave is not capable of this and never will be no matter what they advertise because it doesn’t have it’s own engine.
That being said, these tools will get you quite far against commercial fingerprint products especially ones used for Ads but that will also ruin your browser experience as now you’re just solving captchas everywhere 🫠
Thanks for adding! Could you clarify a bit on the points so I can better understand where I was wrong at?
No. Anything that executes Javascript will be fingerprinted.
That being said it depends who are you fighting. For common commercial tools like Cloudflare fingerprinter it might work to some extent but if you want to safeguard against more sophisticated fingerprinting then TOR and no JS is the only way to combat this.
The issue is that browsers are so incredibly complex that it’s impossible to patch everything and you’ll just end up getting infinite captchas and break your browsing experience.
Yes. There is a firefox extension called Chameleon that does this.
Yeah, I have an anti fingerprint extension installed in Firefox, and immediately no Google site will work anymore, all google sessions break with it while most other sites just continue to work.
I’m working to rid myself completely from Google, my target being that I will completely DNS block all google (and Microsoft and Facebook) domains within a year or so. Wish I could do it faster but I only have a few hours per weekend for this
Mind sharing what extension you use?
Hi, here are the extensions I use in FireFox/Librewolf (all will work in Chromium too, but I don’t recommend Chromium browsers):
Privacy and Security-focused
uBlock Origin: A lightweight and efficient wide-spectrum content blocker.
Decentraleyes: Protects you from tracking through free, centralized content delivery. (not recommended alongside uBlock Origin; see the reply below)
CanvasBlocker: Protects your privacy by preventing websites from fingerprinting you using the Canvas API.
Ghostery Tracker & Ad Blocker - Privacy AdBlock: Blocks trackers and ads to protect your privacy and speed up browsing. Also has a handy feature that automatically rejects cookies for you. (not recommended alongside uBlock Origin; see the reply below. You can disable the ad blocking functionality and keep the cookie rejection function).
KeePassXC-Browser: Integrates KeePassXC password manager with your browser.
NoScript: Blocks JavaScript, Flash, and other executable content to protect against XSS and other web-based attacks (note: you will be required to manually activate javascript on each web page that you visit, but this is a good practice that you should get used to).
Privacy Badger: Automatically learns to block trackers based on their behavior. (not recommended alongside uBlock Origin; see the reply below)
User-Agent Switcher and Manager: Allows you to spoof your browser’s user-agent string (avoid creating a unique configuration; opt for something common, such as Chrome on Windows 10).
Violentmonkey: A user script manager for running custom scripts on websites (allows you to execute your own JavaScript code, usually to modify how a website behaves or block behavior that you don’t like. VERY useful. Check out greasyfork for UserScripts).
Other useful extensions (non-privacy/security)
Firefox Translations: Provides on-demand translation of web pages directly within Firefox.
Flagfox: Displays a flag depicting the location of the current website’s server.
xBrowserSync: Syncs your browser data (bookmarks, passwords, etc.) across devices with end-to-end encryption.
Plasma Integration: Integrates Firefox with the KDE Plasma desktop environment (for linux users).
How do these extensions work with ubo?
On a different note. Your name used to be my nickname lol thanks for that memory.
They work well on desktop and mobile (firefox). As the other replier stated, you may want to avoid using multiple ad blockers (decentraleyes, privacy badger, and ghostery) alongside UBlock; and NoScript’s functionality can be achieved with UBlock.
Lol the name came from a ironscape clan member from my osrs days. I don’t suppose that’s you?
Nope. Just a fan of South Park.
Port Authority is a good one too, I think. Need to check that it is still maintained.
Thanks for this list! Just got off chrome and this helped speed things along!
What search engine do you use?
I want to do this but really the only thing holding me back is my phone.
Further evidence that a Republican government in the USA results in private organisations pushing the bar as far as they can.
In Reagan’s time it was Wall Street. Now it’s Silicon Valley.
You want private organisations working for your benefit and not that of their shareholders? You need a government that actually has the gumption to challenge them. The current US government is 4 years of a surrender flag flying on the white house.
Or we could bin off this fucking failed neoliberal experiment, but that’s apparently a bit controversial for far too many people
Republicans aren’t the problem here, they’re a natural result of a two party system. If you have a coin, half the time you’ll get the “good” side, and half the time you’ll get the “bad.”
And this isn’t to say either side is consistently “good” or “bad,” parties rarely stick anything. The deregulation you’re complaining about started under Jimmy Carter, affectionately called “the great deregulator.” In fact, many (most?) of Carter’s changes took effect during Reagan’s term, and it was incredibly successful.
However, for some reason Democrats are now against deregulation, probably because Republicans took the credit and Democrats needed to rebrand.
That doesn’t imply that Trump’s deregulation is “good,” it just means deregulation isn’t inherently “bad.”
Good thing I erased Google out of my life a decade ago meaning I can much easier block even more of their everywhere present garbage and not have issues.
Ditching gmail remains one of the best choices I’ve made in years.
What did you switch to?
Our work is switching from them and god damn they are so good at things though. I always disliked labels but the layout is top tier.
But yeah they are awful people
I go to pornhub every morning to check out the articles. Lately I’ve noticed that they have exactly the kind of articles I’m interested in always at the top two rows and then a bunch of stuff I’m not really into elsewhere. They are definitely testing stuff.
This article actually shares what changed, as opposed to just asserting that there was a change.
Time for a user agent switcher. Like “Yeah, I swear, I’m a PS5, that has only monospaced comic sans insrelled”
Fingerprinting unfortunately uses more than useragent strings. It takes hashes of data in your browser from a javascript context that is not easily masked or removed. For example, it might render a gradient of colors projected onto a curved 3d plane. The specific result of this will create a unique hash for your GPU. They can also approximate your geolocation by abusing the time-to-live information within a TCP packet, which is something you can’t control on the clientside at all. If you TRULY want to avoid tracking by google, you need to block google domains in your hosts file and maybe consider disabling javascript on all sites by default until you trust them. Also don’t use google.
How must it feel being clever enough to come up with these ideas and then implement them for companies invading everyones privacy for advertisement revenue and malicious information serving or stealing.
I guess they sleep soundly on a fat bank account.
Jokes aside, keep in mind that the idea of fingerprinting is that your computer’s configuration is as unique as a fingerprint (e.g., your monitor is x resolution, you are on this operating system, you are using these following extensions in this browser, you have these fonts on your system).
Setting your user agent to something super unique is basically shining a spotlight on yourself.
It’s way worse than that.
Even if you somehow magically have the same settings as everyone else, you’re mouse movement will still be unique.
You can even render something on a canvas out of view and depending on your GPU, your graphics driver, etc the text will look different…
There is no real way to escape fingerprinting.
I have a novice coding question using the mouse tracking as an example: Is it possible to intercept and replace mouse tracking data with generic inputs? For example, could you implement an overlay that blocks mouse interactions, and instead of physically clicking on elements, send a direct packet to the application to simulate selecting those elements?
Yes, it’s possible. That’s the way a lot of automated web UI testing tools work. The problem with doing it during normal browser use is that your intentional actions with the real mouse wouldn’t work right, or the page would start acting like you clicked on things you didn’t click on.
It would be nice to hammer a manually created fingerprint into the browser and share that fingerprint around. When everyone has the same fingerprint, no one can be uniquely identified. Could we make such a thing possible?
This is called Tor
No it isn’t.
And this is really important. If you go on Google tracked websites without tor, Google will still know it’s you when you use tor, even if you’ve cleared all your cookies.
Tor means people don’t know your IP address. It doesn’t protect against other channels of privacy attack.
Yes, it is… Tor prevents against fingerprinting as well. It isn’t just relay plumbing to protect your IP… This can easily be tested on any fingerprinting site with default config of Tor demonstrating a low entropy https://blog.torproject.org/browser-fingerprinting-introduction-and-challenges-ahead/
It’s been a long while since I looked, but I remember it being a thing in tails to specifically not resize your browser window or only have it full screen to match a ton of other fingerprints.
Plus since it was a live distro that reset on every reboot it would only have the same fonts and other data as other people using tails. Honestly, I hate that all that info is even available to browsers and web sites at all.
Letterboxing has significantly reduced threat presented by window sizing. https://support.torproject.org/glossary/letterboxing/
Tor browser is not Tor.
This is Tor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)
Tor browser is an additional piece of software built on top of it. Using the network(what everyone else means when they say tor) is unfortunately not enough to prevent fingerprinting.
Good point, that difference does matter. I guess other browsers like Brave use the Tor Network, and it would be misleading to suggest Brave has good anti-fingerprinting.
What kind of fingerprint avoidance are you suggesting then that the Tor browser cannot do that makes a difference?
If you enable JavaScript, you open Pandora’s box to fingerprinting (e.g. tracking mouse movements, certain hardware details, etc). If you don’t, half (or more) of the internet is unusable.
No, it is not. Tor Browser != Tor. Get your shit right or be pwned.
*Tor browse
Leave everything default and you’ll look like every other Tor browser user.
We need Richard Hendricks and his new internet asap
What’s this about? Fill me in? 🙏
He was the main character on Silicon Valley
Oh okay. I should pick that show up again, finish what I started.
Thanks!
its more mike judge prophecy stuff. So much of whats going on now was covered in that show.
Google can’t fingerprint you very well if you block all scripts from Google.
Considering how few people block all scripts, this could also make it trivial for them to fingerprint you.
Anyone who uses uBlock blocks Google scripts.
uBlock Origin + PiHole FTW.
I’ve checked, its true. Linux plus Firefox already puts you in the 2 percent category.
plus Random User Agent.
Random User Agent.
I love this.
This breaks all kinds of stuff though. A ton of sites use Google for captchas.
I just don’t use any sites like that. If a site is using something other than Turnstile from Cloudflare, then I refuse to use it. I haven’t really experienced any inconvenience myself with this policy, but obviously I don’t depend on any sites that require recaptcha.
But you can allow/block any elements per site, or globally, which makes it trivial to block all unwanted scripts except on specific sites. So there is nothing preventing you from only exposing yourself to Google on the few sites you use that need those scripts.
Digital fingerprinting is a method of data collection – one that in the past has been refused by Google itself because it “subverts user choice and is wrong.” But, we all remember that Google removed “Don’t be evil” from its Code of Conduct in 2018. Now, the Silicon Valley tech giant has taken the next step by introducing digital fingerprinting.
Oh, forgot to mention - we’re evil now. Ha! Okay, into the chutes.
But why would any browser accept access to those metadata so freely? I get that programming languages can find out about the environment they are operating in, but why would a browser agree to something like reading installed fonts or extensions without asking the user first? I understand why Chrome does this, but all of the mayor ones and even Firefox?
Because the data used in browser fingerprinting is also used to render pages. Example: a site needs to know the size of browser window to properly fit all design elements.
Just for an example that isn’t visible to the user: the server needs to know how it can communicate responses to the browser.
So it’s not just “what fonts do you have”, it also needs to know "what type of image can you render? What type of data compression do you speak? Can I hold this connection open for a few seconds to avoid having to spend a bunch of time establishing a new connection? We all agree that basic text can be represented using 7-bit ASCII, but can you parse something from this millennium?”.Beyond that there’s all the parameters of the actual connection that lives beneath http. What tls ciphers do you support? What extensions?
The exposure of the basic information needed to make a request reveals information which may be sufficient to significantly track a user.
I fucking hate this. Let me zoom, stop reacting and centering omfg.
